Honey Cake at Atwater's Village Bakery: Bees and Bundts, Honey and Hives

At the Village Bakery in Atwater this weekend, owner and baker Barbara Monderine was busy making a beehive-shaped cake with honey from bees raised by her friends Amy Seidenwurm & Russell Bates. (The LA Times ran a piece back in March on local beekeepers, including the Silverlake couple.)

The cake was for a beekeepers meeting at the couple's home in Silverlake that afternoon, where they have a five-box hive and somewhere around 50,000 bees living in their backyard. "What made that cake so delicious was that incredible honey---it's really true that great ingredients are necessary for a great outcome," said Monderine who owns the bakery with husband Richard Williams.

Seidenwurm and Bates don't sell the honey, but harvest it for their friends and themselves.

Moderine always has a small supply of their "Feral" label honey, on the shelf in her office at the bakery, but it's reserved for special occasions. She happened to have two beehive bundt pans for the spiced honey cake, and she sandwiched the two cake halves together with honey paste. The top was drizzled with a honey glaze and decorated with bees that she fashioned out of almond paste. This morning, Seidenwurm showed up at the bakery to thank Monderine with a giant sized jar of fresh honey from their bees.